An embodiment relates generally to external device integration within a vehicle.
Mobile devices are becoming increasingly important in people's lives. Devices are used not only for phone calls, but also for text messaging, social networking, navigation, entertainment, reading, and literally thousands of other applications. Unfortunately the act of driving and the act of using a phone can often lead to unsafe driving. Technologies like Bluetooth have allowed drivers to use their phones for calls while driving in a relatively safe manner. Recently new technologies have been introduced that could enable consumers to use many applications on their phone in a safe manner while driving. These technologies use various mechanisms to present a safe phone user-interface to the driver. Some of these technologies allow the device to directly project a video image to the screen in the center stack of the vehicle. With this technique the device controls what the user sees on the vehicle screen, and therefore it is important that only devices that are approved and known to only project non-distracting images be allowed to project video to the vehicle screen. However, if the device uses a video signaling mechanism outside of a channel used to authenticate the device, then there is a security hole that allows an unapproved device to send video to the vehicle screen using the out-of-band channel while the vehicle assumes that it is communicating with the approved device.